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established when it was first reported by journalistSeymour Hersh, President Nixon accused the press of inflating the case in order to “chip away” at support for the war. When LieutenantWilliam Calley, the commander of the group, was convicted of premeditated murder in My Lai of twenty-two people (he was charged with killing 150) and sentenced to life imprisonment at hard labor, Nixonintervened and reduced his sentence to three months and ordered that he serve his time under house arrest instead of in prison.
    Â â€¢Â American officials lashed out at antiwar activists with extreme rhetoric in 1970. One of the most egregious attacks came from California governor Ronald Reagan, who in March 1970 declared that “if it takes a bloodbath to silence the demonstrators, let’s get it over with.”
    Â â€¢Â Three members of the Weathermen (later called the Weather Underground)—Theodore Gold, Diana Oughton, andTerry Robbins—were killed in an explosion they accidentally set off while making a bomb in a town house in New York’s Greenwich Village on March 6, 1970.
    Â â€¢Â President Nixon announced in a televised address on April 30, 1970, that the United States was invading Cambodia after months of secretly bombing it. In immediate response, more antiwar protests took place the next day than ever before, including in towns and on campuses where antiwar protests had never taken place. This expansion of the ground war into Cambodia, along with the impact of the secret bombing the United States had been carrying out there for several months, killed many thousands of people, ravaged the countryside, and weakened the country in ways that set the stage for the takeover of Cambodia by theKhmer Rouge and the genocide that resulted in the deaths of 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1978.By the end of the war, the United States had dropped more bombs on Cambodia than it dropped in all of World War II in Europe and Asia.
    Â â€¢Â Two days after Nixon’s Cambodia speech, Ohio governorJames Rhodes declared martial law at Kent State University and ordered theOhio National Guard to patrol the campus. Rhodes called the students “worse than the brown shirt and the communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes. They’re the worst kind of people we harbor in America.”
    Â â€¢Â A day later, four students were killed and nine were injured, some of them permanently disabled, on the Kent State campus by National Guard gunfire as students assembled peacefully that Monday for a demonstration at noon. It was the first time Americans were killed while protesting the war.A few days later, according to White House presidential counselJohn Dean, behind closed doors at a Department of Justice meeting, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called one of the slainstudents a “slut” and seemed to have little interest in how they had been killed. No one was ever convicted of the killings.
    Â â€¢Â Shortly after the shootings at Kent State, RepresentativeTip O’Neill, Democrat from Massachusetts, said this on the House floor: “Look at the situation. No nation can destroy us militarily, but what can destroy us from within is happening now.”
    Â â€¢Â Nixon, at the urging of his staff, formed aCommission on Campus Unrest to examine the causes of unrest, including the killings at Kent State. He rejected his commission’s conclusions that White House policies and current social conditions in the United States were the cause of most student protest.
    Â â€¢Â Two students were killed several days after the Kent State shootings by local and state police one night at Jackson State University, a black campus in Jackson, Mississippi. Despite the fact that no students shot at police, and there was no evidence any students possessed guns, city and state police armed with carbines, submachine guns, shotguns, and service revolvers shot more than