Gusztav Asboth, Oral History
Recorded: February 8, 2020
Interviewed by Kurt Eberly
Transcribed by the Kent State University Research & Evaluation Bureau
[Interviewer]: This is Dr. Kurt Eberly speaking on 8 February 2020, at Norfolk, Virginia. As part of the Kent State Shootings Oral History Project, I will be talking today with Gusztav Asboth. I’d like to begin with some brief information about your background. Could you tell us where you were born and where you grew up?
[Gusztav Asboth]: I was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1939. And we left Hungary during the war in ’44. Ended up in Germany and then Belgium and finally United States in 1951. And we ended up in Fairport Harbor, Ohio, east of Cleveland.
[Interviewer]: And when did you first come to Kent State University?
[Gusztav Asboth]: My first visit is probably as a high school student visiting some friends of mine from high school who were earlier—graduated earlier and went to Kent State University back in ’56, ’57, ’58, that sort of thing.
[Interviewer]: And what was your major when you were a student?
[Gusztav Asboth]: Excuse me, now that’s really jumping ahead. I thought the question was when I first visited Kent, not when I first attended it.
[Interviewer]: Oh, I’m sorry, let me, oh, okay. Yeah, what brought you to Kent State University?
[Gusztav Asboth]: I served in the army from ’60 to ’64. And when I got out, I had plans to go to Kent State University.
[Interviewer]: And then what was your major when you were a student?
[Gusztav Asboth]: My major was art history.
[Interviewer]: [00:01:52] Okay, so then what were the prevailing attitudes among the students in the spring of 1970 that you remember?
[Gusztav Asboth]: Well, it was mixed company to be sure. We’re talking about years and years of Vietnam. An increased polarization in this country over it. And we had a lot of returning veterans. In fact, I helped to organize the Kent State Veterans Association, to which I was an advisor because I was already starting to teach after graduate school in Kent. So, there was a lot of ex-military and that sort of thing and then a lot of elements from the left, if you will, and the liberal establishment. It was a very vital place. I understand a lot of faculty from all over the country would take salary cuts just to be able to start teaching at Kent State, in the liberal arts especially. So that was very exciting, and a very dynamic place.
[Interviewer]: [00:03:10] So, were you politically active, like were you involved in any movements or protests or anything going on? Or organizations?
[Gusztav Asboth]: Well, not really. I was sort of a mixed-bag type. I came out of the service and I bought a house on GI Bill in Kent and joined the Ohio National Guard, the Second Squadron of the 107th Armored Cavalry out of Akron, you know, for a little additional income, that sort of thing. And I guess you could say that I was fairly conservative. I certainly thought that the discussions were valid and good to have. I didn’t like some of the extremists. For instance, I was quite upset, I remember at—the flag issue became sort of a very silly front-and-center thing by students doing things to the flag that I didn’t think should have been done. But as far as the rest of it, the dynamicism and this, shall we say, this sort of—very much a society looking and in question about the issue, specifically Vietnam, was certainly valid.
[Interviewer]: [00:04:41] How did you view the protests and the Vietnam War as a whole when you first arrived on campus?
[Gusztav Asboth]: Well, it was a mixed bag. I was in the Ohio National Guard. I was the Armor Intelligence Specialist for the Second Squadron, so I was involved in that and I fully understood that end of it. At the same time, I could see the other side, to be sure, and I never really ever thought that we, from the beginning, that we should have been in Vietnam to begin with. It was very bad foreign policy if you’re aware of the history of the Fifties vis-à-vis the French. And then our policy and the whole thing wasn’t right. You couldn’t even compare it to something like, for instance, to Korea, it’s an entirely different bag of things. So, it was a matter of some very strange policy here. And of course, it was a major effort in this country, not only in terms of lives, young people serving in ‘Nam, but also economically.
[Interviewer]: [00:06:10] Was your family aware of the protests that were taking place on campus, and did any of them communicate their feelings about the protests or the Vietnam War?
[Gusztav Asboth]: Yes, everybody was aware. I mean it was in every day’s paper one way or the other. Remember, the whole national movement, but specifically in northeast Ohio, sure. Most of our students were from northeast Ohio, most of them had families. And everyone was very much interested in it.
[Interviewer]: So, do you remember members of your family, that they were aware and do you remember what their attitudes were?
[Gusztav Asboth]: Yes, to be sure. My mother, who’s very well-versed in history and et cetera, thought the whole thing about Vietnam was quite ridiculous. And this whole idea—I remember we talked about something current at the time, the domino theory—that the horrors of communism and everything else, and they’re going to eat up the world, that sort of thing. And this was, of course, used as a pretext for something that we never should have done. Sort of sad. I read Ho Chi Minh’s little book very, very early. And I served in France during my active duty. So, I knew, intimately, the French Indo-China story, and the whole thing just didn’t sit right.
[Interviewer]: [00:07:43] So, now in the spring of 1970, and that semester, do you remember what the environment was in your classes as far as like the attitudes of the students and the ones—or the attitudes towards the protests going on?
[Gusztav Asboth]: Well, sure. I mean there’s—I need to tell you that, by this time, I finished my graduate work at Kent and, in fact, I was teaching at the branch campuses. I was teaching art history in Warren, East Liverpool, Chardon, and Kent. So, I was pretty busy teaching and finishing up my dissertation. As far as on campus, well, most of the time it was—you know I lived in the community, everything else, so we’re all plugged in, to be sure.
[Interviewer]: [00:08:45] How do you think the people of Kent, and of the surrounding communities, how did they view the Kent State students and what was going on with the protests and everything?
[Gusztav Asboth]: Good and bad. I think, really, what has happened is Kent State became a magnet. I told you earlier that, actually, young potential faculty people would actually take salary cuts to come to teach at Kent because of all the excitement around here. Well, this happened the same with the student population. We had this in-migration of activists from all over the country. And some of these people were really not the best kind of people. As far as on-campus population, I remember there was some tension between some of these people that came in from out of town to disrupt the city. In fact, we, at the time, when the ROTC barracks were burned, we were pretty certain that those people were actually outside agitators and never members of our student community. And in fact, I remember talking to some people in the SDS who really said that they are going to down some of these outside troublemakers. If they don’t leave town, they’re going to tell the police.
[Interviewer]: [00:10:27] Now tell us what you remember about that week between April 30 and then the events of May 4th.
[Gusztav Asboth]: Well, the burning of the barracks, that was a big deal, the ROTC Building. That was a whole new calculus, a whole new dimension on things.
[Interviewer]: And that was what, that weekend?
[Gusztav Asboth]: Yeah, something like that. I can’t remember exactly the day.
[Interviewer]: Because the 4th was a Monday, wasn’t it?
[Gusztav Asboth]: Possibly.
[Interviewer]: Yeah.
[Gusztav Asboth]: As I told you, I was already finishing up my degree, and I came on campus that morning, May 4th—or, I should say around ten, eleven o’clock—to pull slides because, back in those days, you used carousels and slides for teaching art history. And, I had to pull a bunch of slides and take the old ones back for that week’s classes that I was going to teach throughout the system. And around eleven o’clock or eleven thirty or so, somebody in the office told me, and it was sort of general knowledge that there’s going to be a big student meeting on—by the Victory Bell—for around noon. So, I thought I’d go and see what’s going on.
As I left the Education Building, because that’s where the Art History Department was, and I was walking towards the student grounds there, the campus, or the Victory Bell, I realized, to my horror, that there’s only about a platoon of National Guard standing in front of the burned-out ROTC barracks, and there’s probably a thousand, two thousand, whatever it was, students up on the hill, by the Victory Bell. And I hear all this yelling and carrying on. And, to my horror, here the Guard start shooting tear gas, and the wind changed, some of the tear gas came back to the Guard. They had to put on their gas masks. Those horrible M9A1 gas masks with one single canister, which ran out of air very quickly and the glass clouded that up, I know that from my experience. So, these guys are given the order, fixing bayonets, and walking towards these students.
My function in the 107th Armor Cavalry was in plans and operations and training and they did everything that was possibly wrong in that whole move: sending thirty-some men against two thousand students up there. What was fascinating to me and completely unintelligible that, as you looked across this scene, side of the hill where the former, I think they’re still called maybe, men’s dormitories, Stopher Hall and those, and there was a double row of Ohio Highway Patrolmen in heavy riot gear: face shields, helmets, and what looked like about a foot long, or three feet long, hickory batons, standing there observing. And I thought, at any minute what’s going to happen is orders are going to be given to the police to—they were going to disperse the students and send the police in there with the Guard as a backup.
And, of course, that didn’t happen, as the Guard, walking towards Taylor Hall, the Architecture [Department] Building, students sort of climbed up the hill and around the building. Most of the students went on the, as you look at the building from there [editor’s clarification: from the direction of The Commons], the right-hand side, which was a little modern pagoda built there in that area. And most of the Guard then went that way. I went through the first floor, the split-level building that Taylor Hall was, the lower portion was the Journalism Department, and the upper floors, all the way to the top, was the Architecture Department. So, I went through the Journalism, going up a set of stairs, to get out on the balcony of Taylor Hall on the other side. In other words, on the eastern side of the building.
[Interviewer]: [00:15:54] Looking out at the parking lot, yeah.
[Gusztav Asboth]: Looking over the parking lot, correct. And, I get to the scene, it was quite bizarre. There was a construction project starting to be made towards, what I understand later was going to be the new student center and new Olympic swimming pools and that sort of thing. And that area was fenced off for construction. And what happened was, as the Guard came down, they sort of ended up at the front of this fence. The students were on the other side in the parking lot and everything else, and, in fact, there’s quite a bit of construction debris here and there, and they found some pieces of rock and sticks and bricks. And I remember one of the Guard being hit on the shoulder, it knocked him down. He got right back up, and I thought that this is an untenable position. The fascinating thing was the platoon commander was a major, a field-grade officer, ordering this platoon troops, which was quite bizarre.
But anyway, I thought at that point, had they fired, I probably would have understood—not agreed with it, but understood. They were really under, you know, life-threatening rock—throwing rocks. He gave the order for the troops to retreat, which was very smart to do. Back up the hill towards the pagoda. Students didn’t follow, maybe a dozen students at the most followed, sort of taunted them. No more rock throwing, there was no more rocks, it was away from the construction site. And I saw the Guard turn around, level M1 rifles, and [for] no reason at that point at all. As I told you, a few minutes earlier, it would have been a different story. Leveled rifles and start shooting.
It’s funny what your mind does, because I know that rifle intimately. And I’m watching the bolts—the gas-operated rifle, the bolts fly back and forth, and I know. I’m assuming they’re blanks, but I know that the bolts do not operate with blanks. And [unintelligible] that instant, there was a boy in front of me, on the grass, backpedaling when he saw the Guards starting to shoot and he fell and he, what I thought, slipped on the grass until when he hit with his back, this three-foot gush of blood shot out of his chest. And I realized, at that point, believe it or not, that it was live fire. At that point, I reeled back from the railing, and Taylor Hall is built with some big concrete columns, big rectangular columns, that are sort of set halfway in the veranda area. And I quickly went behind one of those, and I’m looking over the scene, down-fire sort of, if you will, looking east, and I see all the students drop here and there and screaming and carrying on and everything else. And, of course, the next victim that I happened to look at is Jeffrey, I think his name is, I just can’t remember his last name anymore. But anyway, of course, he was being tended to, everything else. And, when the gunfire died, I was fairly close to a door, and took the opportunity to dash for the door, and I hit another body, another student along the way, and we both fell into the floor, the hallway, and it turns out to be a very good Palestinian friend of mine, Joe Fawaz. And he looked how I must have looked like. It was totally irrational, this event that was just beyond our understandings.
[Interviewer]: [00:21:02] What was the rest of the day like, then, after that?
[Gusztav Asboth]: I told Joe that we should not leave the building because I have no idea what’s going on, this is totally irrational, this goes against the grain of everything. And I suggested that he and I run upstairs to the very top floor of the Architecture Building, where there’s basically a huge open space with glass all the way around, 360 degrees. That was their drafting area for all the students. And, with that, we could get a 360-degree look as to see what’s going on, because we had no idea what was going on on the rest of the campus. So, we did that, we looked around and we realized that that was the end of it. The Guard moved back. And I glanced towards the burned-out ROTC Buildings and I realize that there’s a bunch of people congregating in one place. I recognized that some of the people were our faculty members with black bands, they were Marshals, Faculty Marshals. And there was obviously National Guard uniform people around them. So, I went back down, out through the journalists’ building, down the hill towards the barracks, towards this group of people. And it turned out faculty was talking to, what’s his name?
[Interviewer]: Oh, yeah. I don’t—the, one of the Marshals?
[Gusztav Asboth]: Faculty was talking to General Canterbury.
[Interviewer]: Oh yeah.
[Gusztav Asboth]: And I recognized one of the faculty members as being Professor Glenn Frank from the Geography Department, who was, I considered him a friend and he, I think, liked me also. And I—that afternoon, I had a chance to talk to him and he was extremely upset, in that the Faculty Marshals were asking General Canterbury to stop any kind of further bloodshed here and give them ten, fifteen minutes to settle down the students before there’s any more fire. And Professor Frank was very upset that General Canterbury’s answer was, “Professor, I don’t have the authority to give you that time.” The implication was that that came directly from Columbus and Governor Rhodes. So that’s the kind of control there was over that situation at that point in time.
[Interviewer]: [00:24:03] What do you remember, then, about the next days, then the weeks after that?
[Gusztav Asboth]: I should tell you that, prior to this, the National Guard set up, and I can’t remember the signal corps unit, the population of that unit, because we used them in training before, but they set up their communication headquarters in the old, abandoned Wills Gym, behind the old Administration Building. And, you know, once in a while, I’d walk through there and talk to the guys, I knew them from training and all of this. And they were very, very busy, and I was trying to figure out what the heck are these guys doing here on campus 24/7? And one of the sergeants that—in fact, he was specialist—who I knew, said, “We’re here to keep Columbus connected 24/7 with the situation here on campus.” So, that’s the kind of control the Governor wants over the situation.
[Interviewer]: [00:25:21] How has this experience affected you since then? I mean, it’s been fifty years, but I guess you must think about it often, being such a traumatic experience.
[Gusztav Asboth]: Clearly, in my mind, the decision-maker, in this whole process, was directly Rhodes. And thinking back about this, Rhodes could not run for reelection as governor, and he had aspirations to run for one of the senate seats from Ohio. And only about a week or so after Berkeley, and after some, maybe Jackson State, whatever, some other student protests, he came out on national television, thinking about his election possibilities too, I’m sure, about he was going to show the country how to deal with student rioters. And so, he certainly did.
[Interviewer]: [00:26:38] Is there anything that you wanted to talk about that we haven’t covered, as far as the events? Any other memories of things before or after or during the event itself?
[Gusztav Asboth]: I think the biggest one is I was very idealistic, I trusted this government, although I was having some serious, serious questions about this Vietnam policy business. And then I realized that, even on a local level, that there was going to be a whitewash of Rhodes vis-à-vis these events. Because I think it was the Warren Commission that basically identified some of his role in this but, basically, the person who was culpable in this whole thing escaped further inquiry. And if you want to really know, I think my biggest disappointment, and this lasts to this day, is that Virginia Guard—not Virginia—Ohio Guard officers closed ranks with the governor on this, when they should not have and they should have kept their honor.
[Interviewer]: [00:28:13] Have you been back to Kent since those days?
[Gusztav Asboth]: Oh yes.
[Interviewer]: And when you went back, did you visit the site, you know, Taylor Hall?
[Gusztav Asboth]: Oh sure. Of course, of course. In ’71, I ended up taking my family, my young family, to Budapest and I was matriculated in a Hungarian Academy of Sciences in Budapest, in an antiquities Ph.D. program. And that was—I did some other things there and stayed in Europe about five years or so. And coming back, I expected to be able to take a teaching position at Kent. When it was announced to me that the liberal arts were badly curtailed in terms of funding throughout the whole state, and that a limited number of liberal arts faculty positions were open. So, I took a position as a maintenance supervisor at the campus. And I worked there for years in maintenance and did some pretty nice projects there.
[Interviewer]: [00:29:45] So when was the last time you visited Kent, do you remember?
[Gusztav Asboth]: Probably about ’82, ’83, something like that.
[Interviewer]: Oh, it’s been that long. Now, would you like to go back to see it again, now that they’ve, since the memorial has been placed and the—
[Gusztav Asboth]: Yeah well, in fact, I designed a memorial. I submitted—in fact, I still have some photographs of the memorial that I designed for the shootings. And, of course, there’s hundreds of them, if not thousands, sent. I certainly don’t resent the fact that mine wasn’t picked. But you know, sure, I was part of that, I was involved in that. And it hurts today, too. It’s the kind of thing, especially the innocence of all of this and the mindlessness of that shooting. You know, some of the rounds actually ended up outside of Ravenna, for Pete’s sake. So, it was the kind of thing that’s—it’s just fascinating.
[Interviewer]: [00:30:52] Was there anything else to add, or did we cover everything?
[recording pauses for a short break]
[Interviewer]: [00:31:05] You said you had some other memories to add to what we talked about.
[Gusztav Asboth]: A person who looms large, in my mind, my memory, is Dr. White, President of Kent State. Truly a scholar, a gentleman. He loved to be able to walk around campus among the students. Everybody would courteously say hi to him. He was a pipe smoker, so was I. And, one day, he’s coming down the administrative building stairs and he sees me with my pipe. He’s seen me several times, he said, “What are you smoking?” I smoked some kind of a cheap tobacco. He says, “Let me have you taste some of my pipe tobacco.” And right there on the steps, he gave me some pipe tobacco, and I lit it up, and it was a wonderful Cavendish of some sort. But that’s the kind of guy he was, the president of the university.
Why is that important? In that, under Dr. White’s leadership, Kent State, from a ho-hum midwestern state school, had incredible ambitions. The new building program, that big high-rise, what was called the new library, instead of the old Rockwell Library, was going to be actually the center and the heartbeat of this new idea. The upper floors were going to be graduate student study and research facilities. We had some very, very important firsts. To give you some idea, the Architecture Department, Dr. Joseph Morbito was head of the AIA, American Architectural Institution, prestigious thing in the country. Our math departments were incredible. I think one part of it was even called Cybernetics. A Dr. Joseph Varga, in fact, did some of the great calculations in nuclear submarine technology, all the math on it, that sort of thing. And we had this incredible—the beginnings of a computer complex, very sophisticated computer complex. We also had, under Dr. Brown, the Liquid Crystal Institute. You know, world famous. That was—Dr. Brown and his people were liquid crystals. Never mind the—they didn’t understand the potential, the commercial potential, I don’t think, of the material itself, because the university very badly managed that, and ended up getting very little money to be able to share some of these discoveries. I remember the Timex fiasco. So, we had some—our Education Department was world-class. And, certainly, people from all over the world came to join the faculty. And, as I said, that it was the kind of place that was really Dr. Brown—or Dr. White, I should say—really intended the university to be one of the best in the country.
So, that was very surprising, and of course, over the years, things didn’t work out that way. One of the things that I remember that sort of filtered down, and I can’t remember how I got this information, is that after the shootings, President Nixon, extremely upset about the fact because he realized it’s going to have major fallout, had Dr. White and others from the university, in fact, I understand that General Canterbury and Rhodes had to go to Washington to have this talk with President Nixon. And I understand that, among some expletives that Nixon was very fond of, he said that the problem is liberal arts education, because that’s what makes all the trouble. And that we should quit educating these people: train them. Train them for a job. And that was quite a shock to me to hear the President of the United States say that. And especially, I can imagine, to people like Dr. White, [university] presidents and people like that. And the heartbeat of American culture should be the liberal arts education that we have. And of course, you look at it today, that’s been the most eroded. So, there we are.
[Interviewer]: I guess that will conclude our interview, and we want to thank you, again, for talking about your memories of May 4th.
[Gusztav Asboth]: You’re welcome, it’s very nice to do that. Very nice to do that, thank you.
[End of interview]
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